I gave this woman a slightly more feminine look and also trimmed her down by manipulating her shoulders. She has also had highlights and shadows added to give her face more dimension, thereby creating a "trimmer" look. Notice too, that I did not manipulate the shape of her head in any way. This would have been quite destructive to her normal appearance. You can still see her skin's natural texture, even though the skin tones have been evened.

This above image is from Dreamstime.com Stock Images

Retouched Images

Many of these images are rollover images. If you roll your mouse cursor over the image, you will see the original. I happen to think this is one of the most useful tools a retoucher can have in their portfolio. Enjoy these, and read on if you like. Or just skip the reading all together. The photos tell all.

Afterthoughts on this page:
This area could use some better organization, so it should be considered incomplete at this time.

Photographic Retouching

The world of photography has always always been in flux. A photograph has been many things... A Daguerrotype, a Rubylith, a Poloroid. Our use of the medium, the cost and the methods of creating an image are still changing.

From my perspective, as soon as I entered the photography industry, my job was to make people look better and feel better about themselves. At first, I did the obvious things such as dust spots, wrinkles and blemishes. But soon I was using my art background and face-shaping theater make-up to really take things to another level. I have added teeth, opened closed eyes, added removed wrinkles from clothes, removed extra chins and shaved pounds off of many a hip.

What has changed in my career is the transition to digital from film. I still appreciate film. It has what I call "organic beauty." But with all the advances that have happened with digital, it is inevitable that most photographers would go strictly digital. For economic reasons and to save production time (now called "workflow"), It makes sense for most businesses.

And I, for one, love digital.

I have mainly worked on portrait photography and just regular, everyday people. There is no reason for a normal person to look at their photograph and have to feel self-conscious about their appearance. It's my job to fine-tune the images (some more, some less) for the best result.

On the other hand I have also learned more high-end retouching where images may require many hours of work to perfect them for publication. This is something that is rarely done in the portrait industry for the sake of time and expense.